3D Graphics Performance in Crysis

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Remember Far Cry? The sprawling outdoor 3D shooter from Crytek made waves back in 2004, not only for its unique twist on the first-person shooter formula, but also for its impressive graphics technology. It immediately became a staple benchmark for hardware reviewers and was able to push the best systems of the day down to “only” 45fps at 1600×1200 with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering applied. Of course, most gamers didn’t have the hottest hardware available at the time, and were struggling to make the game look as good as the screenshots.

Three years later, the team behind Far Cry gives us its spiritual successor: Crysis. It also features its fair share of sprawling outdoor environments, impressive enemy AI, and vehicular combat. Only this time, the graphics are even more impressive. In an effort to make sure Crysis stays relevant on all the great hardware coming out for the next couple of years, Crytek made the game forward-looking. Perhaps, too forward-looking.

Crysis supports DirectX 10 (as well as DX9), and at its highest quality settings, it’s able to push modern hardware so hard that almost nothing short of an overclocked dual-graphics system can run the game at its maximum settings without turning into a slideshow. Crysis has a pair of built-in benchmarks—here we will show you how we run the GPU benchmark to test graphics cards, and give you the disappointing outlook of how well modern cards run the game. Continued…